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Comment by aqme28 | Hacker News Reader

If corporate management knew about and encouraged this behavior, how is that not "Ticketmaster" doing it?

IMO both the individuals and the corporation should be held responsible.

I guess I wasn't as clear as I thought here.

Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act. If laws get broken, the individuals who made that choice should pay the price. This wasn't a defense of the company, I'm fine with the company getting fined here, so long as the people who did this get penalized as well.

So long as we let companies be a sort of shelter for the people inside the company, this kind of activity will continue.

14 employees plus the employee with the stolen credentials were present for at least one of the felonies committed.

There should be at least 15 conspiracy charges in addition to the CFAA violation charge.

Corporations absolutely do act, just as surely a person acts even though only their fingers or individual limbs may be moving. I agree the individuals should be subject to criminal penalties, but so should shareholders and board members, who hoped to profit and looked the other way, respectively.

That's crazy, how about we lock up the janitorial staff as well. They were the toes

Kind of like saying "the 49ers didn't lose, their players did"...

Fines are issued to players, coaches, and the team depending on the severity and type of offense.

Examples:

Mike Tomlin fined for blocking an on-field player, the team may have been penalized by forfeiting draft picks: https://www.nfl.com/news/mike-tomlin-fined-100-000-for-actio... They weren't: https://www.nfl.com/news/steelers-won-t-lose-draft-pick-for-...

Coaches fined $100k for not wearing face masks, teams fined $250k: https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-fines-broncos-49ers-seahawks-fo...

Saints fined $500k and stripped of draft pick: https://www.nfl.com/news/saints-fined-500k-draft-pick-patrio...

Controversial team fines: https://www.nfl.com/news/draft-picks-that-have-been-stripped...

- Falcons for fake crowd noise

- Patriots for "deflategate"

Saints were fined as a team, head coach suspended, players suspended for "bounty gate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Saints_bounty_scan...

Team sports can be lost by a player, but must be won as a team. E.g. Kyle Williams of SF 49ers muffing two punts in the 2012-Feb-22 game against the Giants (off his knee, and the strip).

No, the equivalent of this in the sports world would be fining a team some thousands of dollars for drug abuse instead of banning the offending players.

which they should, if the drug abuse was encouraged by team leaders and rewarded with promotions/contracts.

are you agreeing with the "instead of" in that post?

Through symmetry if a player is expelled from a league for doping, a manager who arranged/encouraged it should face the same, probably.

When Barry Bond got caught doping, nobody said "The SF Giants were doping". Barry Bond owned that.

That's all I'm looking for here.

But this was a collective effort that involved multiple people within the company. When "the Astros" got caught stealing signs, we say it was the Astros, even though the majority of people involved with the team were not involved with the sign-stealing.

You are arguing semantics (and apparently my first post focused too much on semantics). I am mostly concerned about accountability. The Astros cheating scandal resulted in:

> "As a result, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and field manager A. J. Hinch were suspended for the entire 2020 season for failing to prevent the rules violations. The Astros were fined the maximum allowable $5 million and forfeited their first- and second-round picks in the 2020 and 2021 drafts. No players were punished because they had been given immunity by MLB in exchange for their cooperation.[1] The Astros subsequently fired both Luhnow and Hinch on the day their suspensions were announced"

The individuals who made the decisions were held accountable, or at least some of them.

When accountants at Enron defrauded the State of California and the SEC, we didn't say "accountants at Enron." We said "Enron" and held Enron, the entity, responsible.

Also the CEO, COO and CFO were sentenced to prison.

Jeffrey Skilling served 24 years in jail

Andrew Fastow committed suicide

Ken Lay died of a heart attack before his trial

Lou Pai walked away with $250 million and disappeared

The litany of charges that were brought against the rest of the people involved have not been very successful:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-ap-enron-trial-glance-sto...

All of those sentenced in the above article were for reduced sentences since many of them testified against Skilling and others in order to get a shorter sentence.

The only one who served any real prison time was Skilling.

Arguably, three people paid a heavy toll. Escaping prison because of suicide or having heart attack while waiting for your trial aren't exactly get out of jail free cards.

Aside from that, totally agree. Many of the people who benefitted from the Enron disaster walked away without consequence. Very unsatisfying end.

I agree that both the people involved and the company should be legally liable in this case.

The important point to me about the company being liable is that a) the company itself benefited from the crime, and b) management knew about the crime happening; this wasn't a single rogue employee who did crimes and hid that fact from everyone else. (Contrast this to an employee using company resources, in secret, to commit a crime that only benefits the employee.)

And no consequences for the people involved means there's no deterrence. In the future, employees with unethical management will realize that they can do this sort of thing with little risk to their own livelihood, so why not give it a try?

The individuals in the corporation did it on behalf of the owners. The owners should be held accountable

>Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act.

I'm not really sure why you think this distinction is important. If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it. Rather in this sense because there was no real punishment the employee was commended.

> If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it.

The employees most responsible are the executives who signed off on, were aware of and/or managed the criminal activity.

What they felt was a gentle caress across their wrist, which some may pretend was a slap.

> If a sufficient enforcement/punishment was laid on a company you can bet the employee responsible will feel it.

The fine was likely less than the cost of the C-Suites annual bonus package.

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